How decay overtook Walter Reed

The problems at the US Army hospital show how strained military resources have become.

from the March 7, 2007 edition

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Funding for the overall BRAC initiative had been threatened considerably this year to the tune of $3.1 billion under the Joint Resolution for fiscal 2007, according to defense officials. A lower funding level would "jeopardize our ability to complete BRAC actions ... and stymie our efforts to construct facilities and move equipment and people to receiver locations," according to an internal Pentagon memo dated Feb. 15.

The Joint Resolution that cut the funding for BRAC initiatives was passed by Congress and signed by Bush on Feb. 15, but defense analysts like Hellman believe Congress will still fund BRAC at some point in the future under regular appropriations.

However, Lt. Gen. Kevin Kiley, a former commander at the hospital who is now the Army's surgeon general, testified Monday before members of an Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee to say that he had all the resources he needed.

Rep. Christopher Shays (R) of Connecticut became angry when General Kiley maintained that the Army had all the money it needed for the facility.

Failure to air dirty laundry publicly – or maintain you have enough funding when you don't, is disingenuous, Representative Shays said. "Frankly, that's almost – it's being dishonest," he said. "It's being dishonest to yourself, and it's being dishonest to us. And I will look forward to the day when someone who's in uniform comes to us and says, under oath, 'I'm not given the resources I need to do my job.' "

One comptroller's experience

But finding the money necessary to keep a crucial facility up and running should not have been a problem even if it were to be closed, says a former Pentagon official who held the purse strings.

When he was the chief comptroller of the Pentagon up until 2004, Dov Zakheim remembers visiting Walter Reed, but, he says, he was always "escorted," and therefore never had an opportunity to see the conditions in which Iraq and Afghanistan veterans were living.

But money would have been made available to fix the problems at Walter Reed, despite the fact that the facility is slated to close. "Had this situation been brought to my attention, we could have moved money. No one on the Hill would have opposed a reprogramming to improve facilities for those who were injured, wounded and/or disabled," he says.

The hospital had also begun to privatize a portion of its workforce in a controversial move that local lawmakers had decried. More than 350 support jobs at the hospital are to be outsourced.

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